I have been contemplating automated irrigation for the polytunnels and greenhouses. There are some cheap kits on Amazon these days, but I’m way less than convinced that they’ll flow sufficient water for my needs and after stumbling around trying to come up with ideas for something that would work I’ve decided to do things piecemeal.
Initially I’m going to buy a cheap 12V pump that claims to be able to deliver 800 litres per hour. I was thinking of using that to feed lots of drippers, but then it occurred to me that I still have loads of “leaky pipe” that might do the job fine if the water is at a higher pressure than direct from the IBCs that contain the water.
At the moment I can’t decide whether to feed the pump direct from the IBCs or to have them deliver water into a smaller tank through a ball valve and use that to feed the pump.
I guess I can work that out once the pump arrives.
On the assumption the pump side of things works then I’ll start looking into solar power and water level sensors. It’s quite tempting to run everything from a Raspberry Pi to allow “information” to be relayed back to my home network, but one step at a time, eh?